Dear responsible web strategist dude at Thieme Online. I think you need to oversee your SEO strategy. I find it difficult to believe that you intended your second hit on Google to appear like this when I type the word ‘synlett’.

If you have nothing good to say – you can always quote and link to others! The reason updates over here have been a bit sparse lately is not because I am slowing down (like Phil), but because I am terribly, terribly busy with my real jobs. Here we go:

I’ve been working late nights for some time now on transferring a relatively large catalog of chemicals (>1200) from an Excel database into a webpage for a client. I have relied heavily on ChemDraw for Excel. Nomenclature is, as always, a bitch. When working with these quantities, you cannot manually go […]

Hydrogenation using palladium on carbon and ammonium formate is my favorite reaction to perform, because:

It typically doesn’t take more than 10 minutes to get the reaction going, from weighing out the starting materials until the first promising bubbles appear. Almost any solvent is good. I prefer low-boiling alcohols; methanol or ethanol. […]

We were watching Goldfinger (1964) the other day. Again. You gotta love the real Bond movies. Anyways, in the opening scene, about 1 minute and 47 seconds into the movie, I was able to snap a frame with quite a lot of (medicinal) chemistry in it. The whole shot lasts for about two seconds and […]

I have been cleaning up the front page, as you may have noticed. So, where has all the content gone – are all the links gone? The RSS feeds? Worry not. All the stuff that used to sit in the sidebars have been moved into a separate page called “Good Stuff.” Check it out.

Lots of people in chemistry complain about how slow the publication process is. I am by no means an exception. I personally hate the time between the acceptance letter and the first public appearance of the paper. It can take months! When you just want to go out and tell the world… (Not to mention […]

Listen up, kids. If you absolutely must get high, at least do yourself the favor of sticking to good old weed. Grass has been around a while, some 5,000 years or more, and should something go wrong while you puff away, the medical profession and people around you know pretty well how to deal with […]